Most analyses have presumed that South Koreans remain calm because they are seasoned veterans in dealing with such threats. While it is true that South Koreans have had to face such situations on numerous occasions, there is significantly more nuance to exactly why the public remains calm even as North Korea’s threats intensify. Public opinion data helps to illustrate this.

Advertisement

Since mid-January the Public Opinion Studies Center at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul has tracked positive perceptions of both current and future national security among the South Korean public. This tracker has proved surprisingly sensitive in capturing the public reaction to the major events contributing to tensions on the peninsula.

The event that kicked off the recent round of tensions was North Korea’s third nuclear test on Feb. 12. As illustrated in the graph below, this test drove immediate and significant declines in positive perceptions of both current and future national security. But what is surprising is how quickly these numbers rebounded—by the time of President Park Geun-Hye’s inauguration on Feb. 25, both numbers had returned to their pre-test levels.

The next major event came on March 5, with North Korea threatening to abandon the armistice that halted the Korean War in 1953. While this is certainly not the first time that North Korea has made this threat, it seems to have caught the public’s attention, driving significant declines in positive perceptions once again. While the decline in positive perceptions of future national security was within the margin of error of the poll, the decline in positive perceptions of current national security was outside that margin at 9 percentage points. More importantly, it was significant and sustained—current national security perceptions never rebounded.

But more important than the individual events which have the ability—or inability, such as with the B-52 and B-2 flyovers— to sway public opinion is the larger trend. Namely, it is not that South Koreans view their national security as unaffected and therefore the country remains calm. Since Jan. 12, when daily tracking of perceptions of national security began, positive perceptions of current national security have nearly halved, falling from 29 percent on that day to 16 percent on April 8. However, perceptions of future national security remain fundamentally unaltered. While 60% of South Korean positively assessed future national security on Jan. 12, that number was 59% on April 8.

It is this discrepancy that serves to explain the outward calm that has been so widely reported in media outlets around the world. While the South Korean public certainly perceives itself to be in a precarious position, and it knows that North Korea has the capability and the will to carry out deadly limited attacks in the near-term, the endgame still looks the same. At some point negotiations will begin, tensions will ease, and inter-Korean relations will again enter a state of relative calm. Life will carry on, just as it always has, leaving South Koreans to wonder what all the fuss was really about.

The author is a Program Officer in the Public Opinion Studies Center at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. The views expressed here are his own. Follow him on Twitter: @KarlFriedhoff